The Exchange: Alex Ross Demystifies the Art

Music lovers, rejoice: Alex Ross’s new book, “Listen to This,” is here, along with a nifty (free!) online (http://www.therestisnoise.com/listentothisaudio/) with musical samples to accompany each chapter. The book contains revised versions of some of Ross’s best pieces from the magazine—on everyone from Mozart to Radiohead—as well as a previously unpublished examination of a few “common strands of musical DNA” that recur throughout five centuries of music history. (These resilient motifs were also the subject of Ross’s audio-driven talk at the Festival on Sunday, where he discussed the works of Bach, Bob Dylan, and even Led Zeppelin.)

Last week, Ross and I exchanged e-mails about the process of revising essays, the genius of Björk, and the concerts to look forward to this season.

In your preface, you work to dispel the long-accepted view that writing about music is a uniquely difficult task. I particularly liked your phrase “spiritual politics” to describe our lofty expectations of what music can or should provide. Can you talk more about your goal to “demystify the art?”

I do think there’s a fair amount of mystification around music—all that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” business. It’s no less difficult to write about dance, or architecture, or writing. No art can be pinned down in words. But we have this notion that music is peculiarly inexpressible, almost a mystical emanation. Classical music, in particular, has a forbidding, churchlike aura. Unfortunately, people within classical music have worked to make it so. In my writing, I try to stress its purely human side, while respecting its fundamental spooky power. I would never want to demystify it completely.

The audio guide strikes me as a smart and simple solution to some of the practical difficulties of writing about music—especially when each reader brings a different level of familiarity with the works being described. How do you envision your readers using the guide? Should the audio samples accompany the essays like illustrations in a book?

Thanks! I don’t how many hours I spent editing the samples and writing the code. I found a certain obsessive-compulsive pleasure in it. Yes, readers can use the guide as a set of illustrations, or, alternatively, they can listen through the examples when they’re done reading a particular chapter. Of course, there’s always the danger that someone will hear one of my examples and say, “Hey, it’s not how he described it all! No, Mr. Ross, I do not feel ‘daggers of dark desire piercing to one’s very soul’!” (Not an actual quotation.) But the technology is extraordinarily useful. In the new iPad edition of the magazine, we’re trying to weave one or two multimedia elements into each article. I need to get one of them iPad gizmos.

In the powerful conclusion to “Listen to This,” you write about the first-time listener as a “hero”—the missing link that makes a piece like Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony “whole again.” But there’s also a critique here—of concert etiquette that encourages “mass anal retention,” of musicians with “no emotion on their faces,” and of regular concertgoers who snooze or cast disapproving glances. Do you advocate for specific changes that might make a concert hall experience more inviting for first-time listeners?

[#image: /photos/59095398019dfc3494e9e41b]I believe a few changes would do some good: abandoning outdated concert dress, letting go of the nonsensical ban on applauding during multi-movement symphonies and concertos (sometimes silence is appropriate, sometimes it’s anti-musical), darkening the hall so that you’re less distracted by the people around you. But I really don’t think there should be hard-and-fast rules at all. Different kinds of music, and different kinds of performers, demand different approaches. There’s no such thing as “classical music”: it’s a thousand-year expanse of ever-evolving styles. In the past six years the old protocol may have loosened a little. Alan Gilbert, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, now sometimes speaks to the crowd when he’s presenting a new or unfamiliar piece. Outside the big halls all kinds of new approaches are being tried—the much more informal yet still serious atmosphere of (Le) Poisson Rouge, for example. Such a space didn’t exist when I wrote in 2004: it may be a sign of things to come.

How many books do you read for a piece like “The Storm of Style: Mozart’s Golden Mean”? When so much has been written, is it difficult to find something new to say about Mozart—or Schubert or Dylan?

I already had a dozen or so Mozart books on my shelf, and during the anniversary year—the piece was written for the occasion of Mozart’s 250th birthday—I added five or six more. I also looked through recent articles in academic journals; I often visit the N.Y.U. music library for that purpose. I don’t expect to say anything radically new about such a canonical composer, but I try to summarize the current thinking in a fresh and accessible way and add a few personal insights. The challenge is to write something that will capture the interest both of the Mozart scholar and of someone who has hardly read anything about the composer. All New Yorker writers face the same challenge—the readership includes some people who know nothing of the subject and others who know more than you do.

You write that Björk inhabits a unique utopia, where “music is restored to its original bliss, free both of the fear of pretension that limits popular music and of the fear of vulgarity that limits classical music.” Few of us are destined for such greatness, but is this what all musicians and listeners should strive for?

There is something magical about the way Björk has been able to bridge these multiple musical worlds. I don’t think anyone in recent years has so seamlessly combined what we think of as “serious” and “popular” modes. I love her curiosity—she listens to sounds as sounds, and is totally uninterested in dividing them into categories. And I think her most amazing work may still lie ahead of her. She recently played me some music from a future project, and it sounded like the hit songs of the year 2060.

You mention that you revised some of the essays for this book. What kind of revisions did you make?

Some of the essays I left alone, because I had nothing to add. The Björk profile was one of these: I’m particularly happy with it because I recognize her personality and her way of thinking on the page. Others underwent many changes. A piece on music and technology was totally rewritten. I modified some of my writing on Bob Dylan—the earlier version had gone a little over the top. I expanded my appreciations of the singers Marian Anderson and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. And throughout the book I added material that relates to the themes of the second chapter, in which I trace the chaconne form and related laments across musical history. Mozart, Schubert, Verdi, Brahms, and, yes, Dylan all made use of such motifs, so I wove in “lament moments.” I end the book with the great chaconne from Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, coming full circle.

Which concerts and recitals are you looking forward to this season? Do you have any recommendations that might be a bit off the beaten path?

I’m looking forward to Magnus Lindberg’s wild orchestral piece “Kraft,” which plays at the New York Philharmonic this week. The Met, which is currently groaning under the weight of “Das Rheingold,” has several more big productions on the way: “Boris Godunov” (with René Pape), “Don Carlo,” and, next February, the ridiculously overdue Manhattan premiere of John Adams’s “Nixon in China.” I’m curious to hear how Leonard Bernstein’s long-neglected opera “A Quiet Place” plays at City Opera, later this month. I’d also recommend, among other things, the great young British pianist Paul Lewis at the Met Museum (Feb. 18 and April 24); Aki Takahashi and the JACK Quartet playing Morton Feldman and Iannis Xenakis at Poisson Rouge (Nov. 14); and John Luther Adams’s “Inuksuit,” for ninety-nine percussionists, at the Armory on Feb. 20. That will make a mighty noise.

Watch a short (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdZL33997OI&feature=player_embedded) of Alex Ross exploring the evolution of the lamento bass.